A couple of interviews with Final Fantasy XV director Hajime Tabata have surfaced online today, and they provide a great deal of information on the upcoming RPG, including explaining that the game will take place on one giant land mass.
In an interview with GameSpot, Tabata revealed that the entire RPG would take place on a connected landmass, meaning that players will never have to take to the water or the sky to get places. He mentioned that the idea behind this was to make players feel like all the locations in the game are connected both physically and metaphorically.
The towns and the cultural references that you see throughout the world, you’ll get a sense of realistic towns and cultures. That’s one aspect that has remained since the title was first named Versus XIII.
The first town that was showcased was based on Shinjuku in Japan, and one area we showed in December was based on Havana in Cuba, and the other watery town we showed is based on Venice. So those are some cultural references that have been made within the game.
Tabata also noted that within this giant land mass, a number of dungeons can be found and explored. These dungeons will have a certain “strangeness” about them and will hold monsters.
In the most classic Final Fantasy title category, for me, dungeons [were] very scary things that were chaotic and uncontrollable. In the dungeons, there is this kind of strangeness where something that shouldn’t necessarily be there in real life is existing. That kind of strangeness, the non-normal, that feeling you get in those circumstances, will be experienced in XV.
While the game currently does not have a release date, a demo is set to come out in March for early Final Fantasy Type-0 HD buyers. The demo will not feature driving, which will be a big part of Final Fantasy XV, and Tabata explained in an interview with Siliconera that it is because he wants players to spend more time exploring and walking around.
When we were considering a demo primarily about driving in the environment, the normal gameplay would be about an hour or so. We altered the structure of the demo so they could walk more freely in the field then battle monsters. You can really explore wherever you want in the environment and if you play through it normally there is approximately two hours of content. I think you may have seen the footage where you’re walking across a world map. The actual environment in the demo will be several times the size seen in the walkthrough video.
